Escrow Company Fraud! (votre-inspecteur.com)

[jenmatkins]

I was contacted through ebay to purchase a diamond ring. The requester asked if I would ship to France. I agreed and he then requested we go through an escrow company to verify that the ring was real and the funds were safe. I agreed. I created an account at http://www.VOTRE-INSPECTEUR.com and we proceeded to move forward. He sent the money to the escrow fund. I received emails from the escrow company. I shipped the ring and he accepted it. I then received confirmation from the escrow company that were wiring the funds but that since it was the weekend it would take between 2-3 days. It has now been 4 days, the website with the escrow company no longer exists and no one will respond to my email requests. I have emailed directly this David Sabatier person and also sent him an email through his Ebay account. He has not responded. I feel totally stupid for allowing this to happen. The website was very legit. I was receiving correspondence. I had a tracking number through FED EX and I had his mailing information as well as his telephone number. Is there anything more I can do to recover the ring or the funds? I filed a report with econsumer.com and will file a police report. If someone has any suggestions, please let me now. DO NOT SEND ANYTHING THROUGH AN ESCROW COMPANY CALLED http://www.votre-inspecteur.com. It does not exist and probably never did.

(Edit by moderator: split into a separate topic, added company name to title)

[lightfair]

Hello,

I'm sorry to hear about your loss. Yes, it's a scam. I call it "reverse fake escrow" because in most fake escrow cases it's the buyers being the victims, the cases where the sellers are targetted are fewer.
I suspect you did not finish the transaction through ebay, did you? In many cases the sellers agreed to end the auction and sell the item in question (jewelry, exepnsive watches...) directly. Usually the ebay account involved (the one used to contact you) does not belong to the fake buyer; in most cases this was a legit account that got hijacked (through phishing). Still it would be a good idea to report the whole situation to ebay as well.

Since the site is no longer active and Google doesn't seem to have anything in its cache I would ask you to have a look at our image gallery http://escrow-fraud.com/index.php?page=gallery
Maybe you can find which type of site was used for the fraud; this in turn could also be useful to show the police. It's international organized crime; and the police certainly should be aware of the scale of those things.

Could it be that the site was a member of this "family": http://escrow-fraud.com/index.php?page= ... layout=192
Do you have by chance still a screenshot or something like that?

If you look through the forum you will find a number of entries dealing with similar stories, like the following:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1775
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1807
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1876

Also worth reading is the following:

http://netscammers.blogspot.com/

(see the entry on March 14th, 2010)

Please let us know if we can be of further help.